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When some hot piece of new technology arrives, everyone is quick to either sing its praises or tear it down. That’s the nature of technology and culture. If we aren’t collectively enhancing its mythos, we’re collective pointing out its flaws. Sometimes we do both at the same time. By the time we get a device like the Surface Pro 4, it’s usually the praise that dominates the landscape.Read More

Microsoft has said that it’s getting its act together in PC gaming on no less than three separate occasions. The third time, no one believed them. Really, after the disaster that was Games for Windows Live, I’m not sure they believed it themselves. If Microsoft wanted to be taken seriously in console game it had to actually deliver on its promises to treat the PC like a first-class citizen in its ecosystem. It’s with that in mind that you can truly appreciate the small wonder that is the Xbox Wireless Adapter. I know, I never thought Microsoft would do the obvious and provide accessory support for gaming on Windows. Read More

Whoever said that Microsoft’s 343 Industries didn’t have anything to prove following the successful launch of Halo 4 was kidding themselves. Halo 4 didn’t bring Microsoft’s flagship gaming franchise to its knees with glitches and multiplayer failures. It wasn’t a highlight though. Today, three years after the game’s launch, I can say with some certainty that it was my least favorite game to date.Read More

There ought to be a place where recovering addicts who’ve abused the Xbox One’s media integration could go and talk about their problems. In theory, people in attendance would sit with their legs folded in a circle and discuss a time in which they actually did know individual channel numbers and didn’t spend time fondling a bulky controller or yelling, “Xbox, OneGuide.”Read More

The history of Microsoft’s efforts in actual hardware reads like a rags to riches story. Obviously, what happened with the Zune portable media players represents the rags. Zunes were amazing, but in some ways they completely missed the mark. Certainly, they arrived way too late. The Surface Pro 3 is full of promise, arrived early enough in the 2-in-1 craze to be viable and is considered in some circles to be one of the best Windows machines on the market. If you believe Microsoft’s television ads, there is the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro 3. Nothing else.Read More

Way back when Microsoft’s music platform still sported orange and magenta as accent colors instead of green and Xbox Music was still Zune; users had a choice to make. Back then, before Spotify, before the iPod Touch and the Samsung Galaxy S4, there was Zune Music Pass. With it users could download an unlimited amount of songs, listen to them even when they didn’t have an internet connection and share them with their friends through Zune Social. Zune is gone and it’s never coming back, but in its place we have Xbox Music apps and smartphones than run them like the Galaxy S4.Read More